Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 79

His House

Husband and wife Sudanese refugees in England go up in front of a cold-bordering-on-hostile asylum review board, who give them a house to live in along with a bunch of extremely strict rules designed to make them miserable and prevent them from leading any kind of normal life. The house is haunted, but if they leave it or even let on that anything is wrong, they'll be sent back to die.

This premise is a perfect example of what horror can do. The haunting and the reasons why they're stuck with it illuminate the real-life horrors of what they fled and how they're treated in their new country; it's about literal and metaphoric ghosts, literal and metaphoric hauntings, all coming together in a taut, beautifully acted movie about trauma and guilt and survival.

This movie deals with some seriously dark subjects and is also fucking terrifying. The main characters are very sympathetic, and all that combined had me on the edge of my seat for the entire movie, right up to its perfect ending. Very powerful and rewarding if your heart can take it.

It stars Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby in Lovecraft Country) and Sope Dirisu, plus a slightly distracting Matt Smith in a supporting role. Written and directed by Remi Weekes, who has no other credits but a couple shorts. This is astonishing - it's an incredibly assured, well-directed movie. I really hope to see more from him.

His House on Netflix

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Dragonslayer

A very enjoyable 80s fantasy movie which I inexplicably missed ever seeing before, notable for a legit masterpiece of an animatronic/"go-motion" dragon. Forget CGI dragons, Vermithrax is the real thing.

Peter MacNicol plays Galen, the young apprentice of an elderly wizard, Ralph Richardson. When an expedition headed by Valerian (Caitlin Clarke, unconvincingly disguised as a boy) comes to beg the wizard to slay the dragon, the wizard meets with the usual fate of mentors, and Galen and Valerian head off to slay the dragon themselves.

This has more and a more interesting plot than I expected. The dragon is basically just an extremely dangerous animal, but its presence has created a whole bunch of political and social effects. Some people use its existence to seize power and a lottery for virgin sacrifices has multiple unanticipated consequences, but in the midst of all those complications, there's still the problem of how to deal with that damn dragon.

Lots of fun despite a hilariously bombastic score. MacNicol and Clarke are charming. And did I mention that the dragon is great? The dragon is GREAT.

Free on Amazon Prime.

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rachelmanija @ 2021-01-19T12:01:00

So last night a wind storm without rain hit Mariposa. My cabin is fine, except for some shattered glass and fallen branches outside. (The windows are fine, the glass was from a spare pane outside.) However, power and internet are out. I am posting from my phone at my parents house which has a generator.

Just uphill at my parents place, the wind blew down two trees, one directly across the road, and blew the tin roofs off the shed and the chicken coops, all the way across the driveway- that's at least 30 feet.

Power is supposed to be back on by tonight so I'm just not opening my fridge.

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Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

Ursula Todd is born in England, on a snowy night in 1910. Alas, she dies with the cord wrapped around her neck.

Ursula Todd is born in England, on a snowy night in 1910. She survives her difficult birth, but then there's the 1918 influenza pandemic...

Ursula Todd is born in England, on a snowy night in 1910...

Ursula doesn't remember her previous lives, exactly, but she does sometimes get feelings that are clearly based on previous disasters, and uses them to avoid dying, or going down a bad path, or someone else dying. Sometimes this is darkly comic, as when she finds it extremely difficult to avoid catching influenza from a family servant, and tries increasingly outrageous and inventive strategies to avoid this fate. Sometimes it's much more serious, especially once we get to WWII and avoiding her own death or anyone's death feels like an impossible task, even with her extra knowledge.

This novel was incredibly gripping. It's fairly long but I read it over two or three nights. In particular, the depiction of the Blitz was one of the most vivid and horrifying I've ever read. The book has plenty of lighter moments and ordinary family drama, but it's the WW II portions that really stick in my mind. The structure is very well-done.

Warnings for basically everything, including but not limited to rape, domestic violence (this was the most disturbing section for me), suicide, child and animal death, war, etc.

Spoilers!

( Read more... )

Would you recommend any other of Atkinson's books?

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House

I watched this movie with scioscribe in September, and it now feels like a half-remembered fever dream. I am pretty sure it felt like that even while I was watching it.

House is an utterly batshit horror-comedy-I don't even know what from the 80s, and is so totally insane that it achieves some effects which are hard for actual good movies to create, such as unpredictability and making the viewers genuinely uncertain what is real and what isn't. I am not sure that any of those effects were intended.

It starts out conventionally, with a writer, Roger, signing books for a rather peculiar assortment of fans. He calls up his ex-wife and is awkward. He's blocked on his book so he decides to move. So far, so ordinary.

A realtor shows him a house with a pool. Roger sees a boy drowning in it! He runs and dives in to rescue him! The boy vanishes, leaving Roger thrashing alone in the pool! Then it cuts back to the real estate agent, who goes on with the conversation. This was very weirdly edited, leaving me uncertain whether it was a memory or a hallucination or whether it really happened but the realtor was under a spell and didn't notice or WHAT.

The whole movie is like this.

The house has a giant swordfish nailed to the wall.

We then get a flashback or dream sequence or memory (etc) of Roger's time as a soldier in the Vietnam war. He has a buddy who looks exactly like the Punisher from the comic books, and talks and acts like a GI Joe toy soldier in an eight-year-old's game of Vietnam war via osmosis from whatever bits of media he saw before his parents turned off the TV.

Then an extremely bizarre ghost or apparition or monster or SOMETHING appears, a purple woman with fish lips. I was totally uncertain whether it was 1) real, 2) solid, 3) when any of this was happening. The editing in this movie was generally extremely confusing about things like that.

Roger chops it up and buries the wriggling pieces so I GUESS it was real and solid.

Incoherent spoilers. ( Read more... )

This movie has three sequels. It is an actual franchise. I am absolutely boggled by this.

Have any of you ever seen this? Or know what the director was smoking?

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Blink of the Mind (Twilight: Where Darkness Begins # 5), by Dorothy Brenner Francis

When I was in junior high and high school in the 80s, two ridiculous horror series populated the paperback spinning racks at my library.

Twilight: Where Darkness Begins were trashy light supernatural horror reads (nothing too dark or gruesome) for kids too old for Goosebumps.

Dark Forces were trashy light supernatural horror reads (nothing too dark or gruesome) for kids too old for Goosebumps, but with added SATAN.

I didn't much care about SATAN so I preferred Twilight. Did any of you ever read these?

Both these series are now spectacularly out of print, except for Bruce Coville's books to which he retained the rights and has now reprinted in ebook, and are now quite hard to find and many titles are absurdly expensive. This is very annoying as I really wanted to read The Haunted Dollhouse and some others I missed the first time around, like the one about SATAN's 80s video game, but not enough to pay $30-$200 for them.

I decided I deserved a treat after the last fucking Horrible History week, so I ordered the three cheapest, Blink of the Mind, Vicious Circle, and Deadly Sleep.

Blink of the Mind is 154 pages long and involves...

1. An airplane exploding in midair to the sound of crazy laughter.

2. The heroine and her sister repeatedly doing singalongs on a cruise ship.

3. Precognition.

4. Ghost visitations.

5. An evil doctor with red eyes.

6. An evil country club.

7. History lessons on slave rebellions in the Caribbean.

The book has more incident than sense, so I will summarize rather than explain:

High school junior Kelly Chapman's parents have taken off on an unexplained plane trip when she has a vision of a plane exploding to the sound of maniacal laughter:

"Mom! Dad!" the blond teenager cried from the depths of her soul.

She is with her best friend Bonnie at the time and tells her about it; minutes later, she gets a phone call that her parents have been killed in a plane crash. When Kelly is still haunted by this months later, her aunt who I guess got custody of Kelly and her younger sister Lisa consults the family doctor, Dr. Dougal, who advises packing them off on a Caribbean cruise.

The book picks up on the cruise with Kelly and Lisa, who are traveling alone with no adult in charge of them. Kelly is 16 and Lisa is about 14 and I feel like even in the eighties, this is odd.

Lisa enjoys leading singalongs among the cruise passengers and roping Kelly into doing it with her. This takes up quite a lot of the book's page length as there are multiple singalongs. This has nothing to do with anything, other than that Kelly is always reluctant as she's busy having visions and passing out.

Kelly's first vision aboard the cruise ship is of the ghost of her friend Bonnie, who wants to inform Kelly that she hasn't run away, she's been murdered. Kelly grabs Bonnie's shoulder, and wakes up from a "coma" with Bonnie's silver pin and a scrap of her bloodstained blouse in her hand. (This is extremely confusingly explained, as we never get the moment where Kelly registers that she has them, we just see that she does after the fact.)

Spoilers! ( Read more... )

This was not in any way a good book, but I definitely enjoyed reading it and look forward to reading more of this ridiculous series and its SATANic companion.

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Ferris Wheel, by Mary Stolz

Cattle, as Polly has learned, were inquisitive creatures. A truck, a tractor, a person entering their meadowland was almost sure to attract their attention and they would come, sometimes on the run, to investigate, first following and then, if not driven off or diverted, surrounding the intruder, vehicle or person. Polly didn't really like being followed by thirty or so heifers, calves, and cows. She liked even less having them all around her. They were nice-smelling, gentle creatures, but large. And some had horns. They did not use their small pretty horns aggressively. Polly wondered if they even knew they had any. But when one of them nudged you curiously, wondering what you were and if you happened to have an apple, their horns became very much part of the nudging.

I picked up Ferris Wheel, which I'd never previously heard of, at a pre-pandemic library book sale purely because of the author; I'd read exactly two books by Mary Stolz, Cat in the Mirror and Bartholomew Fair, and loved the first and liked the second a lot. I'd rank Ferris Wheel in between those two.

Sometimes it's easy to explain why a book is so good. All you have to is say, that the premise involves a small-scale apocalypse at an Anishinaabe reserve or a civilization of intelligent spiders creating radio with a computer made of ants, and that it does a good job of executing that premise. This is not the case with this book, whose blurb was about as boring as it gets: "Polly finds it hard to cope when her best friend moves to California." So I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.

9-year-old Polly lives in Vermont in the late 70s with her professor father, teacher mother, retired teacher grandmother, and younger brother Rusty; she and Rusty fight so much that it's causing significant family stress, and that's before Polly's best friend moves away. Ferris Wheel's cast of characters are much more vivid than I expected, and the emotions are delineated with a delicate touch. It's a very short book but doesn't feel rushed or slight, and it's got a lovely, understated sense of humor.

Ferris Wheel doesn't reach the heights of Tove Janssen's Summer Book, but it's in the same subgenre and doing some similar things, meticulously chronicling the inexplicable, powerful passions of childhood, the adults with their wisdom and absurdities that you observe without fully understanding, the rhythms of the natural world, and the sense of everything changing with frightening speed, even if some of those changes turn out to be good ones.

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Moon of the Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

Evan Whitesky is dressing a moose when the power goes out in his small, remote Anishinaabe reserve. He and his wife Nicole joke about it when he returns - without TV, they might actually have to have a conversation!

At first no one in the community is particularly surprised or concerned by the outage; up until very recently, this was a frequent occurrence, and the town has diesel generators. But the power stays off, and the truck that supplies food and diesel doesn't arrive, and there's no word from anyone...

This small-scale apocalypse novel is a meditative study of the rhythms of a community, and what happens when those rhythms are disrupted. Its focus is more on the moment-to-moment how-to of dressing a deer and offering tobacco, keeping kids entertained without electricity, and holding community meetings with refreshments than on starvation and shootouts; the latter does happen, but it's understated and a small piece of the whole. Moon of the Crusted Snow has as much in common with other novels about the atmosphere of a particular community, like Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede, which is set in a nunnery, as it does with the average post-apocalypse novel.

A lot of post-apocalypse novels are about the violent disintegration of community, assuming that the moment there's no electricity, everyone will rush out to murder and rape with impunity. Leaving aside that even with electricity, people in privileged classes can already murder and rape with impunity, this assumes that murder and rape is what most men are only prevented from doing by a veneer of civilization; that exterior forces are the only thing holding communities back from utter chaos.

In Moon of the Crusted Snow, exterior forces aren't a wall of civilization holding back chaos, they're the brutal colonization that tried and tries its hardest to destroy the community.

Here an elder is talking about how the younger people have been saying it's the apocalypse and the end of the world.

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here... But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this... what’s the word again?”

“Apocalypse.”

"Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”

Left to its own devices, the community doesn't suddenly revert to barbarity. Nor does it become a perfect haven. Instead, its strengths and weaknesses that were present before the disaster continue, brought into sharper emphasis: people care for each other and make sure everyone's fed, some try to become more self-sufficient while others take the food they're given and complain about it, news travels and stories are told, and they're still vulnerable to invaders.

This is one of those books that's immersive if you like it and stultifying if you don't. It has some very sad parts, but I didn't find it depressing. The apocalypse is never explained because the characters have no idea what happened, though we do eventually learn a bit more about what's going on elsewhere.

I was immersed in it from page one, and found it very moving. It feels like a standalone, but I read that a sequel is in the works. I definitely plan to read that.

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Words that you irrationally hate

(In case anyone wants some distraction.)

I hate the word chunky. It sounds gross, especially used to describe food.

I hate the word bland. It's annoying and obnoxious, especially when used to describe art/writing.

I hate the word tummy. It's infantile and twee and sets my teeth on edge.

What words do you irrationally hate, and why?

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My Best Friend's Exorcism, by Grady Hendrix

In the 80s, at a time of Satanic panic, "Just say no," casual bigotry, and intense class divides, Abby, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, becomes best friends with Gretchen, a rich girl from a cold and abusive home.

The two of them, plus two other girls, take LSD one night. Nothing much happens to three of them, but Gretchen runs off and is lost in the woods all night. When she's finally found, everyone is relieved... but she has no memory of the night. And then strange, horrible things start happening to her, things which everyone writes off according to whatever their own beliefs are. Only Abby, who loves her "dearly but not queerly" by their own catchphrase, knows something terrible is happening, and is determined to save her best friend.

The relationship between Abby and Gretchen, Abby's quest to save her, and the 80s setting are fantastic. There is some extremely scary stuff in there, plus some insect-related gross-outs so spectacularly disgusting that I skipped some pages and kind of wish I'd skipped more. There's also some frustrating plot and relationship loose ends, which I'll detail below the cut. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, but it's not as well-constructed as The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires. However, it does have the same page-turning quality: I read it in two gulps.

The edition I read has "multimedia" components, which are photos of random 80s objects (unnecessary and twee), plus reproductions of yearbook pages and pamphlets on SATAN (fun).

Warning for basically everything, including but not limited to period-accurate -isms, animal harm, and off-page sexual assault.

( Read more... )

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